When I returned to Paris I found that my kind friend Stepan Ivanovich Stepanov, a prominent journalist of independent means (he was one of those very few lucky Russians who had happened to transfer themselves and their money abroad before the Bolshevik coup), had not only organized my second or third public reading (vecher, "evening," was the Russian term consecrated to that kind of performance) but wanted me to stay in one of the ten rooms of his spacious old-fashioned house (Avenue Koch? Roche? It abuts, or abutted, on the statue of a general whose name escapes me but surely lurks somewhere among my old notes). (2.1)

Stepan Ivanovich Stepanov brings to mind Dostoevski's story The Village of Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants (1859). Its characters include Mizinchikov whose comedy name comes from mizinchik, a diminutive of mizinets (little finger). In his letter to Annette Blagovo Vadim compares his mental flaw to a missing pinkie:

Spying had been my clystère de Tchékhov even before I married Iris Black whose later passion for working on an interminable detective tale had been sparked by this or that hint I must have dropped, like a passing bird's lustrous feather, in relation to my experience in the vast and misty field of the Service. In my little way I have been of some help to my betters. The tree, a blue-flowering ash, whose cortical wound I caught the two "diplomats," Tornikovski and Kalikakov, using for their correspondence, still stands, hardly scarred, on its hilltop above San Bernardino. (5.1)

In his article Neskol'ko slov o mizintse g. Bulgarina i o prochem (A Few Words about Mr. Bulgarin's Little Finger et Cetera, 1831) Feofilakt Kosichkin (Pushkin's pen name) stands up for his friend A. A. Orlov (who was attacked by Bulgarin).

In his trip to Leningrad Vadim is accompanied by Oleg Orlov, a poet whom Vadim had met in Paris before Oleg "decided to sell the bleak liberty of expatriation for the rosy mess of Soviet pottage." When they are back in Paris, in the transit lounge of the Orly airport, Vadim recognizes Oleg the moment Oleg addresses him:

"Ekh!" he exclaimed, "Ekh, Vadim Vadimovich dorogoy (dear), aren't you ashamed of deceiving our great warm-hearted country, our benevolent, credulous government, our overworked Intourist staff, in this nasty infantile manner! A Russian writer! Snooping! Incognito! By the way, I am Oleg Igorevich Orlov, we met in Paris when we were young."
"What do you want, merzavetz (you scoundrel)?" I coldly inquired as he plopped into the chair on my left.
He raised both hands in the "see-I'm-unarmed" gesture: "Nothing, nothing. Except to ruffle (potormoshit') your conscience. Two courses presented themselves. We had to choose. Fyodor Mihaylovich [?] himself had to choose. Either to welcome you po amerikanski (the American way) with reporters, interviews, photographers, girls, garlands, and, naturally, Fyodor Mihaylovich himself [President of the Union of Writers? Head of the 'Big House'?]; or else to ignore you--and that's what we did. By the way: forged passports may be fun in detective stories, but our people are just not interested in passports. Aren't you sorry now?" (5.3)

Fyodor Mikhaylovich is Dostoevski's name-and-patronymic. Vadim's novel The Dare (1950) includes "a concise biography and critical appraisal of Fyodor Dostoyevski" (2.5). As to Bulgarin, he was a police agent and Pushkin's Zoilus.

Quirn (Vadim's University) reminds one of Cornell, VN's University in Ithaca, a city at the South end of Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes. Ithaca brings to mind Odysseus, king of Ithaca, the protagonist of Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus's Latin name is Ulysses. One of the main characters in Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is Stephen Dedalus (the principal subject of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Stepan is the Russian equivalent of Stephen.